- people who are willing torturers, not just of KSMs but of el-Masris and Arar’s and 80 yo men on walkers and of children (disappeared children) -

Are you saying that Americans were directly involved in the torture of El-Masri and Arar, or “merely” complicit?

Can you tell this whole mess pisses me off?

Really? Missed that.

I also missed the one line about the Republican Senate source confirming the strategy.

Still, I see no way Obama can withhold the memos any longer; the only question is how heavily redacted they’ll be. And regardless, Rethugs will call it treason for revealing intelligence methods.

As for Johnsen and Koh, the smears are so over the top as to invite satire. And if John Stewart gets on the case, we win. I’m not sure if I should be reassured or horrified by that.

I think you’re spot on regarding trial balloons for how to derail Obama’s judicial nominees. He could have two or three Supreme Court picks his first four years, not to mention dozens of top appellate court and other appointments.

One hopes the Dems are working on their own trial balloons to derail the Republicans. The effect was astounding a couple of decades ago when a then still strong Kodak finally did that. It constructed and flew its own blimp over Tokyo’s skies and the Fuji film building, causing Fuji to bring back its famous blimp, derailing a US ad campaign, in order to defend its home turf.

Whether or not that was an honest statement is another question because the source is anonymous and it’s tough to infer one way or the other without knowing who it is and what their motive for talking with Scott might be.

I’m highly skeptical that this is a sole strategy, but given how far Cornyn in particular has stuck his neck out on torture strategies by writing in National Review as well as talking about it on various shows the last few years, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest that he’d be motivated as much by saving his own face as much as protecting the flanks of some of his patrons. Do recall that Cornyn’s pal is Rove in terms of TX electoral politics.

All of which to say — the rationale keeps shifting as to what the excuse is, but the end result seems to always been the same: discredit Dawn Johnsen before she gets into OLC and has access to all of the memoranda therein and, in the alternative, try to prevent those memoranda from ever seeing the light of day by any means possible.

And, if in the meantime, a strategy set is tested on how to deal with upcoming judicial nominees wherein lies can be floated out and quickly disseminated along the wurlitzer and no one bothers to refute them such that the liars gain credibility to be the sources of the next round of rumors? Well then, so be it. And the fact that these are lies being told about decent human beings be damned.

Can you tell this whole mess pisses me off?

In fact, it’s possible that Horton’s DOJ source was spinning him in an attempt to break the Johnsen/Koh logjam, by linking Republicans who were merely engaging in a standard wingnut smear campaign to far more nefarious and obstructive motives.

Or not.

IMHO (despite my limited qualifications to have an O, albeit H), the memos are coming out — they can’t not come out — and the only debate in Obama land is over the degree of redaction. Expect enough black rectangles to keep prosecutorial hands off intelligence operatives, but not enough to spare the lawyers disbarment and worse.

The opinions the GOP are trying to force Obama not to release authorized specific acts of torture (by defining them as “not” torture). Those acts included waterboarding, “head smacking” (by 200 lb martial arts master special forces operatives), and holding prisoners in boxes the size of coffins (with all the obvious fear that would generate).

Those opinions damn not only Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury, they damn the senior political figures who asked for their “legal” opinions and acted on them. Senate Republicans cannot have missed the news that both Spain and the UK have launched criminal probes into American torturing of persons protected by them. Their investigators might be interested in those opinions, too, as might a general public considering how long to keep the Republicans in the political wilderness.

This is a battle for the rule of law, nothing less. Think of Mel Gibson’s speech to his troops in Braveheart. We may have just “one chance” to get this right.

OTOH, it’s not as though the foreign gov issue is “new” Obama should have had that factored in starting the two years before the election that he began campaigning – not just now. And for that matter, putting Clinton in at State, as good a job as she can do on so many fronts, pretty much ignores the issues of the renditions to Egypt for torture and execution that took place during the Clinton years and that would have to be a part of any thorough approach – after all, whether it was propaganda or reality, the Egyptian renditions were used by al-Qaeda as the supposed trigger for the African embassy bombings.

And it’s why we need to push back ourselves.

Unless and until Obama stands up and says we tortured innocent people and a lot of people shipped through GITMO, Abu Ghraib, Cropper, Bagram etc. and subjected to our “techniques” and “policies” were innocent – until he makes that crystal clear and solid center, he won’t be able to claim any part of the field. But once he does make that stand, then there’s no way to back away from prosecutions and “for real” investigations and the revelations that we KNEW so many were innocent (and where children, crazy, etc.) but went on anyway. And then people are more than “embarassed” and the people who are central to the torture are, for Republican stategies – “throwaway” Republicans for political purposes (Cheney, Bush etc.) but very dangerous and powerful enemies for Obama from a real standpoint (not just Cheney and Bush etc. but all the members of the limited Intel pool who now have a vendetta and who have been nursing a mindset of aggrievedness for along time now – sharing that with the “terrorists” they are supposedly going after).

all fwiw